Paradise Crime Mysteries

by Toby Neal

  He went through the contracts, explaining Makoa’s income stream. The young man was making what amounted to several hundred thousand dollars a year. Lei blinked. “That’s a lot of money. What happens now that he’s dead?”

  “Well, Makoa was smart for a young man of his age. He had most of his money going into a central account, which was being managed by a financial planner and invested. He lived on a monthly allowance. He was saving to buy a house.”

  Harvey removed his red plastic reading glasses and, to Lei’s surprise, mopped his eyes with a bandanna. “I’m sorry. He was such an amazing young man. He was just getting started with his future. Anyway, most of his sponsorships will end with his death, of course, but there is still some residual income that will be coming in from licensing of his name, image, et cetera.”

  “What about life insurance policies and things like that?” Lei asked.

  “Funny you should ask. I was just talking to Makoa about this last week. As part of his contracts, he had to carry a couple million dollars of insurance against being handicapped or killed. He’d just found out that his father had taken out a big policy on him, and he wasn’t happy about it. They didn’t see eye to eye, and Makoa thought it showed how much his father didn’t believe in him and expected him to fail.”

  “So how much is a big policy?” Lei frowned. She was now glad they’d come to this interview before visiting the parents.

  “Three million.”

  “That is a lot. Didn’t Makoa have to agree to the policy?”

  “Actually, no. Parents can take out a policy on children without their knowledge or consent, and children on their parents. Siblings on each other. Spouses. Et cetera.”

  Lei and Pono glanced at each other. “So who was Makoa’s beneficiary?” Pono asked.

  “His parents—but Makoa was so upset when he found out about his dad’s extra policy, he changed the beneficiary of his insurance to his girlfriend, Shayla Cummings. Some of the companies he had contracts with will also get payouts.”

  Lei resisted looking at Pono again for fear of communicating anything.

  Now, not only did the dad have motive, but so did Shayla Cummings—not to mention Eli Tadeo. He might have had a powerful motive to kill Makoa and make his ex-girlfriend rich. And what if Shayla knew? And they’d colluded together?

  They shook hands with the energetic little agent and left with the folder of contracts.

  In the elevator, Lei shook her head. “The plot thickens,” she murmured, flipping through the papers. “I think we need a look at the dad’s financials, too. I have to get on a plane in an hour. I think you should get the dad’s financial information before you interview him. And if I can find the guy who actually killed Makoa on Oahu, we might have a much better idea of why.”

  “I’ll take you to the airport and find out who does the bookkeeping for Simmons Construction. I’ll visit there first before I go interview the parents again,” Pono said.

  “You might want to take Gerry or one of the other detectives,” Lei said. “That dad seems like the kind to lawyer up, or deny things were said without another witness.”

  Pono nodded. They both worked their phones on the way to the airport: Lei called Omura to update her on their progress, and Pono got the name of the bookkeeping firm that handled Simmons Construction’s books from Rory Simmons’s administrative staff.

  After Pono had the name, he hung up. “Now to get my next subpoena going,” he said.

  “You were pretty slick with that,” Lei said. “You got a stack of them pre-signed?”

  “I do. Won ’em from Judge Natides in a poker game,” Pono said. “He made me raise my hand and swear they’d be justified, but he trusted me enough to presign five of them. Can’t tell you how handy they’ve been.”

  “That’s why I like having you for a partner,” Lei said. “I never know what you’re going to come up with, and you pretty much know everybody.”

  “And you keep things interesting on our cases. Never a dull moment when Lei Texeira’s around.” Pono grinned.

  He dropped her at the airport, and Lei went through the check-in process with her weapon and small backpack. She didn’t call Stevens until she was sitting in the waiting area, her eyes on the great purplish bulk of cloud-wreathed Haleakala in the distance through the giant glass viewing window, planes and ground crews in the foreground.

  The phone rang and rang.

  Chapter Eight

  Stevens met Jared in the cafeteria in the basement of the police department building. He clapped his brother’s tense shoulder in a half hug. “Didn’t take Mom long to disappear,” Stevens said. “Let me buy you a burger for spending your morning with her.”

  “Okay.” Jared pushed a hand through short, chocolate-brown hair. His eyes had gone gray-blue with frustration. “I thought she was going to go for the rehab thing.” They got into the straggling line at the cafeteria counter. Stevens made a brief throat-cutting gesture not to talk about it. The station loved nothing better than gossip, and he hoped to get his brother alone in a corner for a bit more of a war council rather than advertising their personal business in line.

  They got their burgers and a plastic basket of fries, and Stevens led his brother to a table in the far corner. He sat with his back to the room to signal he didn’t want company. The station was a friendly place generally, the cafeteria ebbing and flowing with on- and-off duty officers and support staff coming and going from one another’s tables.

  Jared picked up on this and hunched in beside Stevens, squirting mustard onto his burger from a plastic bottle on the table. “So anyway. The doctor met with both of us and went over her results. Mom seemed pretty shaken. Kept saying she was just a little run-down, needed some rest and vitamins. The doc said, “Yes, Mrs. Stevens, that and you need to stop drinking. And to stop drinking, you need professional help and medical support.”

  “I bet she didn’t like hearing that.” Stevens took a bite of his burger, narrowing his eyes.

  “Not one little bit. She acted all insulted, said she’d always had a weak constitution but she’d come here for the fresh air. Trying her whole delicate-flower act. The doc didn’t buy it a bit. Anyway, we went back to the reception area, waiting on some urine analysis results, when she said she had to go to the bathroom. The office told me the results were in, and it had been twenty minutes by then. I got a little concerned she was feeling emotional about it all, went to the bathroom and knocked. Needless to say, she wasn’t there. Or anywhere else in the building that I could find.”

  “What was she carrying when she left the house?” Stevens asked.

  “She had that little backpack she’d arrived with. I guess that should have made me suspicious.” Jared took a savage bite of his burger, scowling. Done chewing, he looked at Stevens. “Can we put out an APB on her? Have her picked up?”

  Stevens shook his head. “For what? She’s an adult with rights, and she’s exercising them. I’m not happy she’s going to be wandering around here on her own, but we can’t misuse county resources having officers look for her.”

  “She’s a danger to herself?”

  “We’d have to have her declared incompetent, and I don’t think that’s going to fly. At least not yet.”

  They both ate some more, and finally Stevens sighed, picked up his drink, and took a long draft. “I don’t think we’re going to have to wait long to hear from her, though. She’ll call when she needs something or runs out of money.”

  They collected their rubbish and left the cafeteria. Jared raised a hand as he headed for the front entrance. “Call me if she gets in touch.”

  “Will do.”

  On his way back up to his office, Stevens decided to stop off at the second floor, where his men had been redistributed. He found his former detective Joshua Ferreira in a cubicle with a couple of other men. “Ferreira.”

  Ferreira stood up, hoisting his belt higher up his paunch. “Boss! I mean, Lieutenant.”

  Stevens flapped a h
and with a grin. “Not your boss any longer. How’s it going down here?”

  “Captain’s got me working Vice.” Ferreira introduced Stevens around. “Lieutenant Stevens is training new detectives.”

  “So now we know who to blame when the pups screw up,” one of the men joked. Stevens spent a few minutes talking with them and then headed back to the elevator. As the doors closed on the warren of cubicles and the busy hum of police work, he again felt a jab of something way too much like loneliness.

  His phone vibrated and he saw that it was Lei and that she’d called several times.

  “Sweets.” Lei heard a roughness in Stevens’s voice when he finally picked up.

  “Michael. I wanted to tell you I’m at the airport on the way to Oahu. I told you I’d probably have to go.”

  “I wish I could come over, too. I could use a distraction.”

  “What? You don’t like the new training detail?”

  “No. It’s not that. Mom skipped out on Jared when he took her to the doctor.”

  Lei sucked in a quick breath of dismay as she listened to her husband’s story about Ellen’s physical situation and then her disappearance. “So there’s nothing you can do?”

  “I don’t see what. I’ve got no grounds to report her a missing person.”

  “But she is missing. You could do a BOLO at least.”

  “And draw attention to the situation? Have one of our teams pick her up, drunk in her own vomit on the street? How would that look for us?”

  A long pause. Lei shut her eyes at the pain in his voice. She rubbed the white gold medallion at her throat. She didn’t care about the embarrassment factor, but he obviously did.

  “She might be in danger,” Lei said mildly. “I mean, the homeless scene’s nicer over here than in some big cities, but we have plenty of overdoses, attacks, rapes, and deaths.”

  “She’s made her choice.” Stevens’s voice went hard. “I came all this way to get away from her, and she followed us over with her shit. Jared and I don’t deserve this.”

  “Honey.” Lei didn’t call him endearments often, but this time one was called for. “I wish I could kiss you and make it better. But it is what it is, and she is who she is. I know because my mother was an addict. Their disease doesn’t have anything to do with us.”

  Another long pause. She heard him blow out a breath. “I know. On one level, I know. But it still feels personal. I guess I need to get over that. I’m sure she’ll call as soon as she needs something.”

  “Probably,” Lei said. “And you’ll help her. Because that’s who you are.”

  “I love you,” he said in a whisper. She could tell he was walking somewhere.

  “I’ll call you tomorrow. Kiss Dad and the little man for me.”

  “I’ll pass on kissing your dad. Kiet can have both kisses,” Stevens said, and Lei smiled as she cut the connection.

  They called for boarding. She stood, slinging her pack onto her shoulder, and got into the line along the huge viewing window, glancing one last time at Haleakala’s shadow.

  The good thing about the flight was that it was short. The bad thing was that she had to fly at all. Lei sat in the window seat of the Hawaiian Airlines midsize jet. Oahu was the hub of most activity in Hawaii, from government to business, and having to take a plane and spend a couple hundred dollars (not to mention renting a car or paying for transportation once you got there) was one of the minuses of living on the neighbor islands.

  Lei felt a painful constriction in her chest as she buckled her seat belt—and realized it was anxiety colored by grief.

  It reminded her of another time she’d buckled into a plane’s seat belt, on her way to another island. She’d been pregnant, and the seat belt had felt tight. She touched her waist now, feeling a familiar pang of emptiness. Sometimes she even imagined she felt the fluttering kick of the baby she’d lost.

  This was the first time she’d been on a plane since the commuter flight she’d been on from the Big Island had been hijacked. After she lost the baby, she had been on that flight back from Kaua`i with Stevens. She’d been so heavily medicated, she couldn’t even remember it.

  Lei couldn’t remember much from that dark time three months ago.

  She reached up behind her neck and took off the white gold medallion she always wore. Thank God she always wore it, or it would have burned, along with everything else she owned, in the house fire that had happened around the same time.

  With the medallion in her hand, Lei settled back, shut her eyes, and began doing relaxation breathing. She’d learned the technique during therapy early in her career on the Big Island. It still worked, but Lei was glad no one had taken the seat beside her. She just wanted to be alone to get through the short trip.

  Once they were in the air, Lei relaxed enough to look out the window at the spectacular coast of Maui on her left. The land draped like crumpled velvet, the clouds a swan’s-down edging. Maui’s rugged topography ranged in color from the deepest, darkest green to the pale yellow of new growth. The edge of the coast was rimmed in black rock and yellow sand, the ocean a navy blue blanket tufted with spindrift far below.

  Lei took out the sketch the artist had done, along with the photos of the two men she was pursuing. She’d taken the copies of Makoa’s professional contracts and told Pono she’d fax him a copy when she got to Honolulu Police Department. Sorting through the contracts, she made a list of contact people and representatives she could interview if she had time—beginning with the personnel at Torque, Makoa’s biggest sponsor. Torque had leased the beach house at Pipeline where Makoa lived during the season along with some of his competitors.

  Lei looked up as the plane began its descent and realized she hadn’t thought about the hijacking at all once they were in the air. The current crime she was investigating was too absorbing. She looked out the window as the plane curved down over the waters of Pearl Harbor, the wreck of the Arizona and its memorial clearly visible under a veil of shallow turquoise ocean. From their line of descent, the iconic profile of Diamond Head was clear in the distance, punctuated by the gleaming skyscrapers of Waikiki.

  Lei’s spirits rose. Since her stint in the FBI and living on the busy island nicknamed “the gathering place,” she’d had a special affection for Oahu, traffic-heavy and crowded though Honolulu was. Marcus Kamuela was meeting her at the airport. He’d texted her that he’d been assigned to be her temporary partner, and she was looking forward to working alongside Marcella’s fiancé.

  She texted Marcus that she’d arrived after the plane landed and got back a laconic ok. She made her way through the airport, inhaling the warm, plumeria-and-diesel scent of the busy thoroughfare outside Hawaiian Airlines.

  Lei was just setting her backpack down when Marcus Kamuela drove up in a black Ford truck with metal racks and a couple of surfboards on it. “Hop in,” he said.

  She grinned, opening the door. “Didn’t know you surfed.”

  “Of course. And we’re going to the North Shore, so we’d better blend.” Kamuela’s brown eyes crinkled at the corners, and his very white grin had a dimple. One muscled arm draped casually in the window frame, he was the picture of laid-back Hawaiian charm—but Lei knew how relentless he could be as an investigator. She was glad to have him on her side for this case.

  “How long’ve you been surfing?”

  “Since small-kid time.”

  “Stevens and I go out. We suck. It’s hard to get better if you start when you’re an adult.”

  “Keep tellin’ yourself that. Maybe you’re just uncoordinated.”

  Lei opened her mouth in indignation and saw Kamuela was teasing her by his grin. He pulled out into the busy traffic. “Listen, I’ve been monitoring your APB on the sketch and airport screen-grab photo. So far, nothing.”

  “I’ve got more now. One of the addresses is in Honolulu, so maybe we’d better go by there before we trek out to the North Shore.” Lei pulled up the address on her phone. “Okay if we get right to i
t?”

  “That’s the plan.”

  “Well, we’re going to see August Jones. His prints were found in the van the suspect rented, and he could match our ID mock-up.” Lei pulled out the man’s printed driver’s license photo and compared it to the screen-grab photo. “Too bad the resolution and angle aren’t better on this.”

  “Can you plug the address into the GPS?” Marcus tapped the dash-mounted device as he continued to navigate the busy morning traffic into downtown Honolulu.

  Lei punched it in, and fifteen minutes later they were pulling into a long driveway with a series of duplex apartments branching off of it. Marcus braked the truck in front of 2A. “This is it.”

  “Gimme a minute.” Lei took her weapon out of its case and reholstered it, put her light jacket on over the shoulder holster, and buckled on her ankle piece.

  “Getting extra-strapped?” Kamuela quirked a brow.

  “This ankle rig saved my life not long ago. I’ll tell you about it later.” Lei got out of the truck, and she and Kamuela mounted chipped cement steps to the apartment’s beige door. Lei knocked. A few minutes later, a young man opened it. He was clean-shaven, around five foot ten with dark skin and black hair. Lei mentally compared him to the sketch and the photo—he could be the suspect, but she didn’t feel a sense of recognition.

  “August Jones? We’re from the police department.” Lei and Kamuela showed their badges. Jones didn’t blink or look worried.

  “What can I do for you?”

  “We were wondering if you could tell us a little about your recent trip to Maui. May we come in?”

  The young man invited them in, and they perched on a stained vinyl couch. He picked up a few pizza containers off the coffee table. “My roommates are a little messy,” he said. “What’s this about?”